PHOTO: 119 Persons Confirmed Dead In India Train Accident

Death toll in Indian train crash has been put at 119 with more than 150 injured.The county’s express train derailed in northern state of Uttar Pradesh on Sunday.The death toll was initially put at 60 with more than 80 injured.Police said the toll is set to rise amid a scramble to locate
survivors as people were still missing, while authorities tried to
determine what caused the derailment of 14 carriages of the train.The train was travelling between the north-eastern city of Patna and
the central city of Indore, but suddenly roll off the tracks in
Pukhrayan, 65 km south of Kanpur city.Authorities said they were checking the condition of the tracks but
would need to look further before concluding the cause of the
derailment.This is India’s deadliest rail tragedy since more than 140 died in a 2010 collision in West Bengal.Desperate survivors searched for family members and some tried to
enter the damaged carriages to rescue relatives and collect belongings,
said senior railway official Pratap Rai.

“We are using every tactic to save lives but it’s very difficult to cut the metal carriages,” he said from the accident site.Kanpur district magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma told Reuters that 119
people were confirmed dead, while 78 of the injured remained in
hospital, four of them in a critical condition.With rescue teams still looking for victims amid the wreckage, the
toll from the derailment could rise to become India’s worst rail tragedy
in this century.In what was probably India’s worst rail disaster, a train plunged off
a bridge and into a river in 1981 in Bihar state, killing an estimated
500 to 800 people.India’s creaking railway system is the world’s fourth largest. It
runs 11,000 trains a day, including 7,000 passenger trains carrying more
than 20 million people.But it has a poor safety record, with thousands of people dying in
accidents every year, including in train derailments and collisions.Suresh Prabhu, India’s railways minister, said in a tweet that the
government would investigate the causes of the derailment and promised
accountability with the “strictest possible action”, as well as
compensation for the affected passengers.(NAN)